A Flexible Hardware Accelerator for Booth Polynomial Multiplier

This article presents a parameterized/flexible hardware accelerator design tailored for the Booth polynomial multiplication method. The flexibility is achieved by allowing users to compute multiplication operations across various operand lengths, reaching up to 212 or 4096 bits. Our optimization strategy involves resource reuse, effectively minimizing the overall area cost of the Booth accelerator design. A comprehensive evaluation compares the proposed multiplier design with several non-digitized bit-serial polynomial multiplication accelerators. Implementation is realized in Verilog HDL using the Vivado IDE tool, featuring diverse operand sizes, and post-place and route assessments are performed on the Xilinx Virtex-7 field-programmable gate array device. For the largest considered operand size of 1024 x 1024, our Booth accelerator utilizes 1434 slices and can operate on a maximum frequency of 523.56 MHz. A single polynomial multiplication operation requires 0.977 mu s and the total power consumption is 927 mW. Moreover, a comparison to state-of-the-art accelerators reveals that the proposed flexible accelerator is 1.34x faster in computation time and 1.05x more area-efficient than the recent dedicated polynomial multiplication design. Therefore, the implementation results and comparison to the state of the art show that the proposed accelerator is suitable for a wide range of cryptographic applications.